[HN Gopher] Does SharePoint destroy intranet design? (2010)
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Does SharePoint destroy intranet design? (2010)
Author : open-source-ux
Score : 17 points
Date : 2022-10-19 11:56 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nngroup.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nngroup.com)
| at_a_remove wrote:
| My Sharepoint experience can be distilled into a few lessons:
|
| First, if you do not have a "webmaster" (a person who has
| authority to delete things, to tell people to "knock that shit
| off," and whose job it is to regularly patrol this content), you
| can and will end up with an endless mess of duplicates,
| partially-constructed sites, Potempkin villages where a traveler
| might foolishly expect content, and swollen archives of
| irrelevant data jammed in as a backup.
|
| Second, people invariably notice workflows and they have the
| brilliant idea that they can attempt to automate a lot of paper-
| pushing. This is almost true, and only becomes completely true if
| they hire someone who is a Sharepoint admin, with real chops.
| Now, administration will not want to invest in another FTE, so
| they will instead attempt to hire someone who is half a
| Sharepoint admin, and half something else, usually whatever their
| current needs are. This is akin to laying out job listings for
| part-time brain surgeons who are also world-class detectives when
| they're not playing musical venues; Buckaroo Banzai never answers
| this particular call, and you get left with some clunky, badly-
| implemented workflows.
|
| Third, you must have someone _else_ responsible for hosting,
| backup, and upgrade of Sharepoint. You 're not doing upgrades
| often enough for you to be good at it. Similarly, backups and
| restores ought to be left to the people who are into that kind of
| thing. See #2.
|
| Fourth, as much as you would _like_ a clean separation between
| intranet and extranet, you will invariably get "requests" from
| Important People that such and such from some other organization
| have access and can collaborate with some of your other internal
| intranet users (which _ought_ to be redundant but now is not).
| You must recognize this from the beginning and plan accordingly.
| bombcar wrote:
| You forgot the part where even though you carefully do NOT use
| Sharepoint at all, it turns out Teams uses Sharepoint as the
| backend store for "files" and now you have a mass of files in
| Sharepoint you didn't even expect.
| yokoprime wrote:
| Where would you rather see Teams store files? SharePoint is
| at least a known factor. Some esoteric new backend for files
| in Teams doesn't make sense. I really don't see the issue
| with SharePoint file storage once you've accepted the
| adoption of Teams.
|
| You can turn off file handling all together in teams, which
| it sounds like you should have done.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's not a bad place, and it works decently well, but for
| people not expecting it it can be surprising.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Leveraging SharePoint was essential to getting the product to
| market. SharePoint sucks, but has stuff like eDiscovery that
| is absolutely essential.
|
| End of the day, SharePoint is cheaper than a file server as
| you get a file solution a MVP discovery solution, and a MVP
| workflow engine that is good enough to get started, but lousy
| enough to sell Dynamics or PowerWhatever.
| Hello71 wrote:
| OneDrive for Business is also SharePoint, and Teams is also
| Exchange (sort of)
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Sharepoint deployments that don't take into consideration actual
| user needs might, but isn't that true of anything?
| open-source-ux wrote:
| Related: A free guide on the usability of intranet design:
|
| _Intranet Portals: UX Design Experience from Real-Life Projects_
| https://www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet-portals-experiences...
|
| A small usability lapse: no publication date on the page, or in
| the report (presumably intentional). The report states:
|
| " _The research for this report was done in 2013, but the
| majority of the advice may still be applicable today, because
| people and principles of good design change much more slowly than
| computer technology does._ "
| PinkMilkshake wrote:
| I've created a bunch of flows that log information from forms
| into lists, track submissions, move files around, etc. It's been
| very useful. But I still struggle to understand SharePoint.
|
| I've survived by maintaining a well-organized bookmarks folder.
| I'm never the person holding up a meeting trying to find that
| important document.
| running101 wrote:
| In short, yes
| yokoprime wrote:
| This article is very outdated, and SharePoint has come a long way
| since it was written. Is it amazing and lets you create the most
| exciting designs? Nope. But its not "destroying" intranet design
| CharlesW wrote:
| Exactly. Betteridge's law of headlines strikes again:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
|
| It would be as sensible to ask, "Do CMSs Destroy Internet
| Design?" If you're building a custom CMS for your company
| intranet instead of using SharePoint, a wiki, Notion or
| whatever, you're doing it wrong.
| grumblepeet wrote:
| Well considering this article is 12 years old it shouldn't be
| used as a definitive description or narrative on SharePoint for
| intranets today. The whole platform was rebuilt a few years ago
| and runs on React now. That doesn't mean I think SharePoint is a
| best of breed internet, far from it, but if you have licenses for
| m365 already then not using it is a waste really.
| codevark wrote:
| ics wrote:
| Might as well post this here because I don't see Sharepoint
| discussed here often. I love-hate Sharepoint. I love that lists
| have brought colleagues into really considering how to store,
| manipulate, present data in a way that's more rich than a
| spreadsheet with clever formatting. At my work we set up a
| Sharepoint site for each project, ostensibly to manage documents
| but I see it as a way to create project-as-an-app, where
| constraints and workflows can be built with minimal effort and
| used without special tools, just a good mind for data interfaces.
| Not without its headaches for sure, but I would be very
| disappointed to lose its power as a non-developer who still
| wrangles lots of information.
|
| What I wonder is what alternatives are out there, open source or
| otherwise which are similarly flexible? Airtable seems similar
| for some situations but opinionated. FileMaker feels pretty niche
| and quite expensive to host. What draws me to Sharepoint Lists is
| that it feels like a backend and fronted at the same time, so
| it's easy to experiment with near instant feedback.
| shubb wrote:
| Mabe also Notion's embedded databases (tables) - it's a wiki,
| and you can embed a table in your page which you can interact
| with - but that table is actually a view on a 'database'
| (linked tables) you have created. You can achieve quite a lot
| with it, and it's simple enough that most people can use it.
| ics wrote:
| You're right, I had forgotten while leaving my comment but
| it's the closest that I can think of. I haven't used it
| extensively since the official API became a thing so perhaps
| worth revisiting. I do wish Notion had more control over
| formatting, in the way that Sharepoint let's you do all kinds
| of tricks with JSON formatting schema. The ability to flip
| between different views (list, card, calendar, etc.) is
| great.
| prepend wrote:
| I don't like SharePoint lists very much because they are hard
| to work with outside of SharePoint. I'd rather just have an
| excel spreadsheet so I can "detach" it from SharePoint and
| email it around.
|
| Compare it to airtable as far as usability.
|
| I'd rather just store data untyped in json and use it with
| anything.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > I'd rather just have an excel spreadsheet so I can "detach"
| it from SharePoint and email it around.
|
| "Hey Bob, where are the latest numbers?"
|
| "It's in Numbersv4Final.xlsx "
|
| "So what's in Numbersv4Final2.xlsx?"
|
| "I think that's the version Jane was working on.
|
| "I see a Numbersv4Final_Jane.xlsx ", is that based on Final
| or Final2?"
|
| "Ask Jane?"
|
| "Jane quit last week. She said she if she was going to work
| in a circus it might as well be a literal one."
| bombcar wrote:
| This is the reality - people are so burned into "file based"
| thinking that anything outside it really hurts their brains.
|
| Multiplayer powerpoint that apparently uses Sharepoint as the
| backend somehow is pretty useful, I'll grant that.
| ics wrote:
| Everything Sharepoint is kludgy once you try to step outside
| it's domain. I was surprised recently that Power Automate has
| a built in JSON parser, but CSV is by a third party. Still, I
| wouldn't say it's overly onerous if getting things into JSON
| or a spreadsheet are all you need. Very common for people
| building Power BI dashboards, or using the list to construct
| API queries to other systems. Weird example, but you can
| build what is effectively a DSL, so users can create queries
| and workflows just by creating list items with the available
| options, which can then be translated into code. "Stupid
| Sharepoint Tricks" but it's nice because they're self
| documenting, come with authoring history and access control,
| and doesn't seem scary to some users.
| gompertz wrote:
| I have to ask this here... Because I have the same annoyance
| with SharePoint Lists.
|
| While you can import a sharepoint list into Excel and refresh
| as you desire... You actually can't edit in Excel and push it
| back to sharepoint. I wish it was bidirectional. If anyone
| knows of a way or even a 3rd party app that allows this
| please let me know. Ideally I would expect third party tool
| to be similar to a database explorer /navigator where you can
| CRUD - but this doesn't seem to exist.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _If anyone knows of a way or even a 3rd party app that
| allows this please let me know._
|
| Potential commercial solution: https://www.synchronizer-
| for-excel-and-sharepoint.com/
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